‘A Dirty Shame’: John Waters’ misunderstood box-office bomb
You could argue that many of John Waters’ films have been misunderstood. While there are people out there who hail him as a God, labelling him the ‘Pope of Trash’ and the king of all things bad taste, his work has also caused people to be physically sick, repulsed by his lack of regard for comfort and causing offence.
While movies like Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos remain some of his most notorious, both released in the early 1970s to significant outcry and even censorship, there is one Waters film that fails to get the same level of attention. A Dirty Shame, released in 2004, is Waters’ last movie to date, sadly receiving lukewarm reviews and grossing just $1.9million against a $15m budget.
What went wrong? It came after the most mainstream period of Waters’ career, with Hairspray, Cry Baby and Serial Mom all faring well with critics and fans and even attracting a wider audience outside of his devoted crowd. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Waters then experimented with movies that were neither as accessible as the aforementioned titles, but not as far-fetched as Pink Flamingos, resulting in Pecker and Cecil B Demented.
With A Dirty Shame, however, Waters decided to pen a screenplay closer to his roots, exploring a town divided by sex obsessives and prudes. It’s the kind of story you can imagine Waters telling back in the early 1970s, with Divine perhaps playing Tracey Ullman’s Sylvia Stickles (or maybe she’d play her N-cup daughter Caprice?), David Lochary as Johnny Knoxville’s Ray-Ray Perkins, and Edith Massey playing a woman with a bizarre sex fetish, perhaps akin to the man who dresses like a baby.
By making the film in the early 2000s with established stars instead, it sits uneasily between the sheer ridiculousness of his early work and the more polished look of his later films. Waters’ outlandish ideas certainly would have fared better if they were filmed a few decades prior on grainy 16mm. In fact, if A Dirty Shame did emerge back then, filmed with Waters’ signature DIY, guerrilla style, you can be sure it would’ve become one of his most iconic films.
There are some incredibly insane moments here – a character picks up a water bottle with her vagina in the middle of a care home’s dance session to the ‘Hokey Cokey’, while another becomes a sex addict after he is hit on the head with David Hasselhoff’s poo, which flies down from an aeroplane.
These scenes might not rival the real consumption of dog poo in Pink Flamingos, or the close-ups of a prolapsed anus and the genuine fellatio Divine gives Danny Mills, but A Dirty Shame possesses the same spirit. Perhaps if Waters had come up with the idea for the film back then, he would’ve incorporated some even more graphic and explicit ideas. However, bound to the demands of producers (something he used to take care of himself), the film naturally couldn’t go as far as when Waters was a drug-obsessed young filmmaker with absolutely no limit.
While A Dirty Shame suffered from the restrictions placed upon it due to the very nature of its absurd and X-rated concept, critics were certainly too harsh on the film, which contains some of Waters’ most ridiculously fun dialogue. “We got blatant homosexuals shopping right in our store. They eat life you know. Sperm!” says Big Ethel in one scene. “I’m a cunnilingus bottom, and I’m your mother,” Sylvia tells Caprice during a bonding moment in another sequence. Waters is at his most shameless here, with characters like Fat Fuck Frank and the three Bears making for endless entertainment.
The film might seem like one obscene spectacle, but in classic Waters style, dig a little deeper and you’ll find rich social commentary. Here, the filmmakers seem to be commenting on cinema’s attitudes towards sex and the ongoing divide between those who see sex as liberation, freedom, and pleasure, and those who believe it to be sinful and shameful.
This contrast has caused tension between different social groups for decades, but here Waters brings it into comical full focus, waging a full-on war between the ‘neuteurs’ and the fetishists, crafting a world where pleasure and expression prevail.
